Listening to the doomsayers over the past several weeks, you might believe that America is on the edge of imposing martial law on some of our most revered institutions of higher education — or that the toppling of those institutions is near, through the withholding of federal funds and the withdrawal of their preferred tax status.

These naysayers would have us believe that such outcomes risk our very democracy, and that the government has no business applying a heavy hand in the name of protecting Jewish students from violence, intimidation and harassment.

They would, however, do well to consider the hypocrisy of their position.

Those raising the alarms might imagine an executive order directing federal troops onto campuses in the name of protecting Jewish students. Or they might imagine a Supreme Court decision endorsing the “weaponization of the IRS against a political adversary of the president” through the revocation of the tax-exempt status of a private university, as Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers recently lamented.

Such possibilities are easy to imagine because this has all happened before.

The former occurred when President Dwight Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10730 on Sept. 24, 1957, ordering federal troops to the campus at Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. to enforce racial desegregation.

The latter happened in 1983, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in

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